Peer to Peer Networks for Defense Against Internet Worms.pdfVIP

1 Peer to Peer Networks for Defense Against Internet Worms Srinivas Shakkottai , R. Srikant Abstract— Internet worms, which spread in computer net- works without human mediation, pose a severe threat to com- puter systems today. The rate of propagation of worms has been 6 measured to be extremely high and they can infect a large fraction 0 of their potential hosts in a short time. We study two different 0 methods of patch dissemination to combat the spread of worms. 2 We first show that using a fixed number of patch servers performs woefully inadequately against Internet worms. We then show that y a by exploiting the exponential data dissemination capability of P2P systems, the spread of worms can be halted very effectively. M We compare the two methods by using fluid models to compute two quantities of interest: the time taken to effectively combat 8 the progress of the worm and the maximum number of infected hosts. We validate our models using Internet measurements and ] R simulations. C . I. INTRODUCTION s c The advent of malicious mobile code has lead to a paradigm Fig. 1. Graph from [1] based on Internet measurement data, illustrating the [ nature of propagation of the Code-Red (v2) worm. shift in Internet security applications. Earlier, computer viruses 1 were inherently limited by the fact that human mediation v was required for them to pro